Jive Team Wins Startup Weekend in Ogden

We celebrate innovation here at Jive. Last weekend, two members of our Dev team, Jonathan Aaron and Jordan Davidson, won first place at Startup Weekend Ogden, a regional branch of a worldwide tech entrepreneurship competition. We love having top talent with us and want to recognize them for their big win!

Startup Weekend is a worldwide organization dedicated to bringing talent together and challenging them to launch a startup in 54 hours. The weekend begins by hearing startup ideas from every participant. People then vote on the best ideas, then choose which team they would like to participate with. Every member of the team brings a unique skill set and often teams consist of developers, designers, marketers, public relations specialists, and strategists.

While at Startup Weekend, Jordan had the idea to create HotPi, a smart home thermostat system that runs off a Raspberry Pi. Jonathan was excited for the prospect and jumped on board after hearing the idea. Many consumers are frustrated with the outdated user interface and lack of features in their home thermostat, but don’t want to front the hefty price tag of existing smart thermostat systems like Nest. HotPi fills a need by providing an affordable, configurable, and easily accessible thermostat system. Jordan and Jonathan are pictured below.

HotPi replaces your current thermostat and connects in with your existing HVAC wiring. Changing the temperature is easily done from your smartphone or an intuitive web interface. You can also place sensors throughout your home which wirelessly communicate with your HotPi. Eventually, they hope that this will allow the thermostat to provide a comprehensive look at the heating profile of your home. (Translation: if your basement is 50 degrees and your main floor is 73, the HotPi sends you a notification and makes heating decisions based on your preferences.) Over time, HotPi provides you analytics about your heating profile and helps you to make smarter energy decisions.

Currently, the team has working beta versions of an iOS app and a web interface. They hope to continue developing this idea and anticipate providing an open source DIY kit so users can build their own version of HotPi.

The HotPi team is made up of Jonathan Aaron, Jordan Davidson, Margie Johnson, Adam Yost, Landon Call, Lynette Hicks-Padilla, and Michael Daniels. Below is a screenshot of their user interface.